Schloss Moosham — the Zauberer Jackl trials, 1675–1690

OVERVIEW

Schloss Moosham is a spur castle at 1,079 m near Unternberg in the Lungau, Salzburg, first documented in 1191 and held by the Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg from about 1285 as the seat of their district judges. Archbishop Wolf Dietrich stayed here in October 1611 on his flight from Salzburg, shortly before his capture. The court was dissolved in 1790 and the castle decayed until Count Johann Nepomuk Wilczek bought and restored it from 1886.

HISTORY

In 1675 Barbara Koller, a knacker's wife from near Werfen — a despised trade — was arrested for robbing an offertory box at Golling, confessed under torture to being a witch, and was executed at the Gneis place of execution in Salzburg that August; under torture she said her son Jakob, about 20, had a pact with Satan. 'Schinder-Jackl' or 'Zauberer Jackl', who had gathered a band of beggar children around him, vanished; despite a rising bounty (the Elector of Bavaria offered 100 thalers dead, 500 alive) he was never caught. Arrested beggar children, tortured, named others, and the hunt snowballed: from 1675 to 1690, 232 people were accused — the youngest three to five years old — and 167 executed (the German article; the English gives 139), the youngest about ten. More than two-thirds were male, more than half children and young people of 10 to 21; nearly all were beggars. In 1681 alone, 109 were executed. They were burned, some alive, others after hanging or beheading, some after their hands were cut off and they were branded.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The trial transcripts show, the English article notes, that the children's confessions were 'guided' by the interrogators' suggestions, so that Jackl grew in them into a sorcerer who could make himself invisible, set mice and rats on the harvest, and — in legend — turn into a wolf. Where the killing happened is told differently: the German article puts almost all executions at Gneis in Salzburg, with further executions in the Lungau after 1681; the English calls Moosham the administrative centre of the trials and says many executions took place there. In the city, overcrowding meant boys were held in the Hexenturm in 1678–1679. A record of the witch-hunt, filed as such.

VISITING

Moosham is private property of the Wilczek family but open to the public; its collection includes trial records and original and reconstructed instruments of torture from the time of the trials around 1680. Two 1969–1972 horror films were shot there.